ABSTRACT
The process by which dietary discipline ceased to be a primary means of expressing Christian identity was long and complex. This progressive estrangement of diet from faith was due partly to specific identifiable shifts in the character of religious life and its regulation. More significant, however, was an instability latent in the rules for monastic living as they developed in the early Christian centuries. As has been seen, a key aim of these rules was to moderate excessive ascetic feats, which harmed the body and disrupted community life, rather than to promote higher degrees of asceticism or even to preserve an existing degree of asceticism. Nevertheless, their effects were markedly different in medieval Western societies, in which extreme asceticism was less highly respected. Moreover, as will be seen in this chapter, from the early thirteenth century a revised model of Christian dietary discipline was provided by the Franciscans and Dominicans. This marked in some respects a return to the simplicity and poverty of diet of the anchorites. It nevertheless also amounted to a relaxation of monastic discipline, which had originally been predicated on a stable and ordered dietary regime. For the first Franciscans and Dominicans, living among secular society and begging for alms as mendicants, a degree of dietary flexibility was essential. Christian dietary discipline has so far been regarded principally in light of
scripture and ascetic traditions. By the fourth century, however, a new project was gaining momentum: the definition of Christian doctrinal orthodoxy and the preservation and transmission of that orthodoxy. Patterns of Christian dietary discipline had previously been established by the fairly straightforward appropriations by Christians of models of dietary discipline drawn from scripture and other spiritual traditions with which they had contact. The increasingly prominent doctrinal context meant, however, that diet gradually became an important means by which communities and individuals with an increasingly clear and distinct sense of their Christian identity distinguished themselves from other groups and individuals of other religions. This chapter will begin by returning to the Benedictine Rule and considering
why the decline in abstention from red meat in monasteries occurred. We shall then examine the impact made by the new mendicant orders of the thirteenth century by focusing on Francis of Assisi, and finally consider the developing doctrinal and philosophical implications of these practices.
